“Okay, this place is huge. Bill must be totally loaded,” Nicole says, spinning around in the entrance hall.

“Uh, yeah,” I say uncomfortably.

“If I marry your stepbrother, do I get to be rich too?” she asks. I snort.

“First, he’s not my stepbrother. Second, meet him and then reconsider that idea. Come on, let’s go upstairs,” I say. She, Miles, Corey, and Faye follow me upstairs. I push open the door to my room and go inside, but Nicole hesitates by Garen’s door.

“Is this his room?” she mouths, pointing to it. I nod, and she claps. “Please introduce me? ‘Cause I was talking to Tanya Jacobs in gym and she says he’s totally gorgeous, but he’s not in any of my classes, so I haven’t seen him and please?”

I roll my eyes and push past Miles and Corey back out into the hall. I pound on Garen’s door.

“Garen,” I say loudly. Nicole grabs my arm.

“Wait, you’re not going to say anything embarrassing, are you?” she asks.

“I’m going to tell him you want to have sex with him,” I say.

“Travis!” she half-shrieks. “If you do that, I will never speak to you again.”

“What?” Garen asks, opening the door.

“Nicole, Faye, Miles, Corey,” I say, pointing to each in turn. “Wanna come watch a movie with us?”

“What movie?” he asks. Faye produces the DVD from her purse.

“Edward Scissorhands,” she says. Garen looks around the group, then back at me.

“Can’t,” he says after a moment.

“Why?” I ask.

“’Cause I hate you,” he replies. I move to hit him in the chest, but he catches my hand before I can actually make contact. I expect him to drop it, but he doesn’t. Just holds my fist there against his chest.

“Seriously. Why?” I ask.

“I just told you,” he says, raising his eyebrows. He shifts our hands so we’re more or less palm-to-palm and laces his fingers through mine. “But seriously, I’m busy,” he adds.

“Doing what?” I ask. He raises an eyebrow as a slow sort of come-hither smile forms on his mouth. I cough and extract my hand carefully from his. He crosses his arms across his chest and leans against the doorframe.

“I’m just doing something,” he says. His voice is lower, flatter than before.

“Um… okay. We’re just gonna…” I jerk a thumb towards my room, and as if on cue, my friends filter back into it. I pause in mid-turn and swallow before turning back to face him.

“You have fun with that,” I say.

“With what?” he asks. I let my eyes flicker down him once, then fix them back up on his face.

“Being busy,” I say, smiling just barely. He bites his lip to keep back his own smile, something I’ve noticed is out of habit. I turn around and head back into my room.

-

“Motherfuck!”

The word bursts out from Garen’s room in the few seconds of silence between songs, louder than the music itself, which is saying something. It’s followed by a loud crash, then more silence, then the wail of a guitar from the stereo.

I get up from my bed cautiously and go out into the hall. Garen’s door is still shut. It’s been like that since my friends left, which was at least two hours ago. I hesitate for a second, then knock.

“What?” Garen yells over the music.

“Can I come in?” I ask loudly. The music cuts off immediately.

“Yeah. Sure,” he says in an almost defeated voice. I push open the door. Garen sprawled on his bed, his head hanging off the foot of it. His eyes are closed and he’s rubbing his temples.

“Are you dying?” I ask nervously. I’ve seen him every day for two weeks, and I’ve never seen him look this pissed off and depressed.

“No. You will be, though, if you don’t leave,” he says through gritted teeth. I shut the door behind myself and sit down on the edge of the bed.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. Wordlessly, Garen points across the room. A textbook is lying open, facedown, half hidden in the open closet door. I pick it up and brush off the cover.

“You’re taking Genetics?” I ask.

“I’m supposed to be. Only I can’t understand a fucking word of it because we never covered genetics at Patton, and there’s a test on Tuesday, so I guess they expect me to just figure it the fuck out,” Garen says.

“Do you want me to help?” I say. “I’m a psychotic overachiever, remember?”

Garen rolls over onto his stomach and props himself up on his elbows.

“So I exaggerated, I get some of it. It’s the motherfucking squares. There are going to be a bunch of ones we have to fill out on the test, and I have no idea what to do,” he says. I smile and sit down on the bed next to him.

“They’re called Punnett squares. And they’re actually easy, once you realize what you have to do. Notebook?” He hands me his from the floor and I draw a box, then a cross inside it.

“Say you’ve got two people with different eye colors who get married. The woman has blue eyes and the man has brown eyes, but his father had blue eyes. Blue is a recessive gene, so we show that by using a small letter. Go with ‘b’ here. So the woman has lowercase ‘b’, lowercase ‘b’ as hers. The man has one lowercase ‘b’ from his father, but because he has brown eyes, he has to have gotten the brown eyed gene, which is uppercase ‘b’ from his mother. So his genetic genotype is uppercase ‘b’, lowercase ‘b’. If they have a child—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Garen interrupts.

It goes on like that for at least an hour. It takes me a while to adjust the way I explain it, and it takes Garen a while to adjust to actually listening for once. He’s not stupid, I know that. He just doesn’t care. I figure that out soon enough. His attention wanes, he stops listening, I have to start over.

“Okay, two brown-eyed people. One is homozygous, one is heterozygous. You want me to draw the square?” I ask. Garen yanks the pen and notebook out of my hands, draws the square, and fills in all of the boxes in under five seconds. He tosses the notebook back onto my lap, rolls onto his back, and stares up at me.

“I’m not a moron, Travis. I understand it now,” he says. I blink a few times, then stand up.

“What?” I say. It comes out strangely, definitely not my normal voice.

“I have green eyes. You did tell me what you use for green eyes, and we ran out of cases for the letters to be,” he says.

“That’s something different. And it won’t be on your test. This is only about basic crosses and dihybrid crosses. So you’re fine,” I say. He wrinkles his brow and lets go of my arm.

“Oh,” he says, and before I can stand up again, “Are you going to Blaire Kennedy’s party on Monday?”

“The Halloween thing?” I ask. He nods. “How’d you hear about it?”

“Some guy from Musical Theory told me and asked if I wanted to go with him and his friends,” he says dismissively, and my eyes snap up to his face. “So, are you?”

I shrug.

“Nicole is trying to force me, ‘cause apparently Blaire’s got a thing for me and will be pissed if I don’t show. I still kinda want to skip it though.”

“Go. It’ll be cool. And if it’s not, we can leave early, no harm, no foul,” he says. I shrug again.

“It seems like a waste of time. Plus, no costume,” I say.

“It is a waste of time, that’s the point. And just call somebody and ask them to help you find one. I’ll bet Nicole is just begging to suit you up in something that matches Blaire’s,” he says. Practically spits.

“What?” I say, frowning.

“What do you mean, ‘what’?” he says.

“You said that weird,” I say. Now it’s his turn to shrug.

“No, I just… I mean, Blaire Kennedy?” he says.

“What, you don’t think she’d like me? Too good for me?” I ask. He shakes his head.

“No, moron, you’re too good for her. The girl’s the biggest slut I’ve gone to school with in years,” he says.

“You’ve been going to an all-boys military school for like, three years,” I point out. Garen raises his eyebrows at me.

“And you think we don’t have sluts at all-boys military school?” he says. I don’t know what I want to say to that. Well, that’s not true. I know exactly what I want to say, I just can’t. Shouldn’t. Won’t.

“What?” Garen asks, studying my face.

“Nothing,” I say, shaking my head. He cocks his head to the side.

“Are you thinking about whether or not I’m gay?” he asks. I turn to face him so fast I hear my neck crack.

“No, I’m— alright, I am. I definitely am. I’m sorry, but you say things like that, and you say things to me, you do things to me. You act like you are, but you don’t say you are,” I burst out. He doesn’t look pissed, which is definitely not what I expected. He looks intrigued, sits up and crosses his legs with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward slightly.

“Do you honestly think I have to? It’s not like straight people work being straight into conversation, so gay people don’t usually have to either. I wouldn’t say it either way. It’s just not like my sexual orientation is one of the first things I feel compelled to tell people about myself. Like how you take meds. I’ve seen you take them, I know you take them, but we don’t have to have a twelve hour talk about you taking them. It’s the same thing with sexuality, no matter what it happens to be,” he says. He pauses, then starts retwisting one of his spikes. “Besides, why does it matter to you?”

“Because it’s kind of come up, in case you haven’t noticed. Actually, you probably haven’t, because you’ve been too busy biting my ear to really pay much attention to anything else,” I say. Garen bites his lip on his smile, a gesture that I’ve realized infuriates me.

“I was wondering when you were going to bring that up. Two weeks, though. I’m impressed,” he says.

“Shut up,” I say. “You bit my ear in the middle of the school hallway.”

“I know,” he says, sounding all too proud of himself.

“You can’t do that,” I say.

“Why not? I don’t remember you complaining at the time,” he says.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was supposed to cause a huge scene and have everyone realize what we were doing,” I say.

“‘We’? Oh, so it was a mutual thing, then? See, I was kind of worried you weren’t into it,” he says. It takes everything in me not to shove him off the bed right there.

“I wasn’t into it, Garen. We were right in the middle of school!” I snap. His eyebrows shoot up just as I realize that was the wrong thing to say.

“What, it would’ve been okay if we had been here instead?” he asks.

“I didn’t say that,” I say.

“You didn’t have to,” he replies. I look quickly down at my hands and start tracing the lines on my palm.

“Look, all I said was that we were in school. And I’m really not into that,” I say. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Garen roll onto his knees and move a little bit closer. All of a sudden I feel his hand on my jaw, turning my face toward him.

“We’re not in school now,” he says. There’s one second of stillness, and then he leans forward. I’m not sure if his lips actually touch mine or not before I stand up quickly and head for the door.

“I have to go,” I whisper. I leave the door open behind me and cross the hall into my bedroom, slamming the door shut behind myself. I lean back against it, and that’s when it finally hits me. When he leaned in, I tilted my head to the side before I even thought about pulling back.